Word: nation
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Administration already bogged down in a health-care debate and with its hands full of domestic economic problems persuade Americans that nation-building in Afghanistan is the right thing to do? Tellis believes Obama needs to make the case that U.S. security necessitates it. "Ultimately, it's not about Afghanistan for its own sake, but as an instrument to defeat al-Qaeda, and defend the [American] homeland," he says...
...thing to ask for more time, and quite another to explain how, for instance, creating a mobile-banking network helps the fight against al-Qaeda. The benefits of nation-building programs are often indirect, and hard to measure. (Ultimately, the hope is that access to banking will make farmers less reliant on loans from drug smugglers, and so less likely to grow opium, which helps finance al-Qaeda and the Taliban.) (Read "Is the Taliban Stockpiling Opium...
Then there's the question of priorities. Should energy and money be spent on supporting a media commission to monitor bias, or on recovering territory under Taliban control? Jason Campbell, an Afghanistan expert at the Brookings Institution, lauds the lofty goals of nation-building, but says, "when you drill down, our resources are finite, and we have to start making priorities." Rather than be "overly concerned with quality-of-life issues," the Administration should right now focus on "reducing the violence and helping establish legitimacy of the [Afghan] government...
...already the bloodiest since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Large swaths of the southern and eastern regions of the country are under the control of militants, while some security analysts estimate that the Taliban has a permanent presence in at least 70% of the nation. As the election nears, the frequency and ferocity of attacks by insurgents have spiked. The U.N. reports that in the first six months of 2009, civilian casualties from such attacks - as well as from friendly fire - are 24% higher than in the corresponding period last year. July was the worst month ever...
...Afghan President Hamid Karzai's more formidable opponents - yet he isn't a chieftain, a warlord or even a candidate in the Aug. 20 Afghanistan presidential election. Just 30 years old, Popal is a rare individual in the country: a community organizer who heads the Afghanistan Youth National and Social Organization (AYNSO), an NGO that, in a nation marked by division, transcends religion, ethnicity and tribe. AYNSO's broad objective is to promote democracy and human rights. But Popal's current objective is much more specific: mobilizing AYNSO's 32,000 members to unseat Karzai, who he believes has done...